Skills to improve upon: When MIT Sloan School of Management Communications Group asked students what skills they would like to improve upon, the top eight skills students listed were:
- In-person presentations
- Meeting management
- Data visualization
- Giving and receiving feedback
- Writing
- Presenting online or via video
- Intercultural communication skills
- Email management
“We strive to prepare students to become principled leaders in the future,” says Kara Blackburn, senior lecturer and co-author of the survey, in a statment. “That means balancing the skills students know they want and the ones we know are critical for future leaders. The results of this study have affirmed our emphasis on developing and delivering effective and engaging presentations, since students view this as a critical skill.”
As students see the importance of visual communication in the workplace, MIT Sloan will be adding a required course this spring as part of its Business Analytics certificate called, “Communicating with Data.”
“Modern professionals need to be as skilled with visual communication as they are with written and spoken communication,” says Miro Kazakoff, lecturer, developer of MIT Sloan’s Data Communications curriculum, and a study co-author, in a statement. “In the era of bigger data, making the right decision and convincing others to act on it requires an ability to read and write in pictures. The power of visuals is their ability to convey relationships that are increasingly challenging to explain with just words.”
Material from a press release was used in this report.
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